It’s mid-summer, and the ball parks are full of screaming fans eager to enjoy a baseball game. It’s just like any other summer.

Is it though? I ask because America seems to be in the grip of another ball frenzy, trading in bats for nets—really big nets, the kind that make basketball players envious. The balls are bigger than in baseball, and unlike baseball, the game plan requires much more fancy footwork.

I’m talking about soccer.

Soccer fever has gripped these 50 nifty United States and refuses to let go, even as our home team has bowed out of the World Cup with a loss to Belgium. However, the fever intensified one game earlier when the U.S. defeated Bosnia-Herzegovina.

I can understand the soccer fever. It’s a sport that doesn’t get as much attention as baseball, football, basketball or even hockey. While those sports have fully-funded leagues, major league soccer still is seen as more of a club status.

Soccer was a major sport at the high school I went to. In fact, the varsity team won two state championships while I was in high school. It wasn’t because of me. I can tell you that my footwork was not fancy at all in high school—or even now.

Still, it was a fascinating sport to observe. While the aforementioned sports were front and center for folks and glued them to their television sets as I was growing up, soccer was something that needed to be seen in person. You have people that are having to figure out how to kick something and not touch it with their hands. It’s easy enough to hold a ball with your hands, but when that option is taken away, things get more interesting.

I would say my high school soccer team’s winning ways helped draw my interest, unlike the football team, which managed to draw a crowd even though some of the games looked like perfectly orchestrated train wrecks. Who knows? If the football team had some skills and won a lot more games, I might have become the football fan my sweetheart, Todd, deserves.

Soccer definitely got more love in Chino Valley, not only because of the highly successful high school team but because of the club programs that taught children at a younger age. Granted, you see a lot of that in some small towns, but once you get past high school, you don’t see as much love at the collegiate level, and the pro level? Forget about it.

It’s unfortunate that soccer isn’t more prevalent here in the United States. Other countries treat it with the same “religious” reverence that we do for other sports. Major League Soccer was formed here in 1996, but how often do you see televised games? How often do sportscasters gush over the latest news from soccer teams?

Instead, we wait every four years for the World Cup to roll around, and then all the closeted soccer fans bust out of their dungeons and turn “goal” into a 30-second word—or however long it takes the fan screaming it to run out of breath. It’s been nice to see, but I still think there should be more.

Still, I’m hopeful that maybe soccer will join the upper echelon of American sports someday. Just take a look at women’s basketball. Once upon a time, that was not even a blip on sports fans’ radar. Even when the WNBA came into existence in 1996, the same year as Major League Soccer, it took a long time for professional women players to be taken seriously.

Now, you see a lot more interest in the WNBA. It’s not as high as the NBA, but history is rife with not taking women as seriously as men. Still, I hope that the same amount of attention that’s paid to women’s basketball gets applied to soccer, as well—whether it’s men, women or both.

I think the recent World Cup being hosted in part in the United States, along with the team’s win in the elimination tournament has helped to boost interest. Whether that interest translates to continued fandom or switching back to the other sports for the next four years is a question I’m very much looking forward to seeing the answer to.